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The Murder Complex Lindsay Cummings Books

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The Murder Complex Lindsay Cummings Books

I follow Lindsay Cummings on Instagram and Youtube and I just love her to pieces! She has such a great personality and one day I'd love to meet her. But in several interviews, she did mention while writing this book, she went through a bout of depression due to some illnesses she's had, and I totally saw that being reflected in this book.

This book was dark and bloody and sometimes unnecessarily so. I felt ok about Meadow and ok about Zephr. Both of them didn't really make me feel for them like I sometimes feel for characters in books. I liked the alternating chapters style and didn't get mixed up while reading it. Lindsay provided different voices for Meadow and Zephr and I thought that was done really well.

I guess my main problems with this book were the world building and the writing style. First the world building. I didn't quite understand why the world turned out the way it did. How come the death rate is so appalling and killing just like this was ok. The government seemed really bad but how did it get this way? It gets somewhat explained towards the end but I wanted more! In this Dystopian world, there's not really this BIG BAD that I felt like controlled everything and gave us a reason to fear it. There were just crazy people running around that were supposed to be "the government" so it didn't quite make me understand how this world worked.

The writing style, while sometimes beautiful, I felt lacked description. I wanted a more rich book...as rich as a pool of fresh blood!!! The pacing was really really fast and sometimes I wished it slowed down a bit to provide richer description of the setting or feelings these characters were having. For instance, sometimes with certain action scenes, I'd get confused where the characters were and how the fights were happening. I didn't know who was in the scene and where the bad guys were in connection to the good guys in a room!

The ending was definitely a cliffhanger and I have no idea how Lindsay is going to turn this one around in the next book. It's almost a dire situation so I'll just leave it at that. I will be picking up the second and last book (I heard this was a duology) because I want to support her in every way! I just hope some of the problems I encountered in this one is somehow fixed in the next!


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The Murder Complex Lindsay Cummings Books Reviews

I wish I could give this exactly 2.5 stars, because it toes the line between being engaging enough to finish, but incomplete enough to feel like an early draft.
With disease eradicated via technology, overpopulation is controlled by violent means. We explore this world through duel-protagonists, a hardened young woman named Meadow and a flat young man named Zephyr.

Spoilers below, so many spoilers

Though told through alternating viewpoints each chapter, both Meadow and Zephyr have the same voice. There's some clunky writing here. The part where Meadow must catch a train to go to the center to "apply" for a job is confusing. I was never clear on why she was told to get on the second train, but then wonders if hers is the right one.

When she is pitted against another applicant in a fight to the death, the scene lacks any sense of drama because her brother has already been through the same thing. It reminds me of a scene in Pierce Brown's "Red Rising." At least in that book, there were consequences to the killing. But we already know she's a protagonist, we know she's going to fight to the death, so there's no suspense, and no remorse. Of course she wins.

The world-building is greatly lacking. Alright, so there's overpopulation due to everyone being so healthy/disease-free/functionally immortal, and the authorities have a shady system by which they use lab-grown children to murder citizens to keep the population at bay. But why? There are so many other ways to deal with the issue! Why is birth control or sterilization not mandatory for one? Meadow is irritated when she sees pregnant women, angry that they're increasing the population when resources are thin. There doesn't seem to be any religion or state doctrine against birth control, so why, when the tech exists to heal wounds so quickly and prevent disease, is birth control beyond their reach? Did I miss that part? Does it not work because of the nanites in their blood? If the big evil authorities can shoot people for TALKING during the "silent hour," then surely they could forcibly sterilize people.

The convoluted system of having sleeper agents programmed to murder citizens based on a lottery, a justice system that allows authorities to execute rule-breakers at a whim, and a generally desperate populous that occasionally murders for personal benefit (like the pirates and gravers) seems wholly unbelievable as a way to deal with overpopulation.

Why did no one foresee that eliminating natural death would cause a shortage of resources? Even today, in real life, there are ethicists studying such issues. Are we to assume they all died in the fictional plague of the story? Or did they just vastly underestimate the effects the nanites? The news articles that Meadow uncovers about her mother and her scientific breakthrough that "saved" the world are laughably bad.

This is frustrating, because the nanites that keep people healthy are a believable future tech, as is the constant surveillance of citizens and dwindled resources. But when you have lines about how Meadow's family has never had an entire fish, it just comes off as goofy! Never had an entire fish. And yet later, she catches one with her bare hands and eats it raw. Yes, that's "forbidden," but she says she does it just how her father taught her! If he taught her, then they've had a whole fish, illegal though it may be. Or did they always turn over the hand-caught fish to the rations department? It's not clear.

There's a scene in the graveyard where Meadow's dad ends every other sentence with "Meadow," like a cartoony villain.

The "romance" is terrible. Period. Nonsensical, rushed, and lifeless.

The weirdly out-of-place sexism is bothersome. This is set in the future, and the Initiative doesn't seem to regard women as less. It was a woman who implemented the whole thing! Women kill and are just as violent as the men, but people still use phrases like "cried like a girl" and make references to "all women should know how to cook," used as an insult to Zephyr. Symbols of the former society are forbidden, so why is the sexism still at play? Especially when the language has changed enough to include silly pseudo-cursing like "flux" as the new F-word?

Finally, we come to the novel's title, named for the organization/program in the book used to control the population via MURDER. What government names things so hilariously? I get it, dystopian crap-sack world, but really? Governments love euphemisms, like "collateral damage." You would think they'd name it something less literal, like Resource Management Complex, or Population Control Complex if they had to be obvious. Its so silly that I kind of love it.

All in all, it's not a good book. With a few more drafts and some serious work to the science as well as a complete removal of the terribly written romance, it could be decent.

Even with the flaws, I don't exactly hate it. I think it could be a good choice for a YA book club, because it would likely be a polarizing novel with plenty to discuss. Flawed novels make for very lively discussions!
I follow Lindsay Cummings on Instagram and Youtube and I just love her to pieces! She has such a great personality and one day I'd love to meet her. But in several interviews, she did mention while writing this book, she went through a bout of depression due to some illnesses she's had, and I totally saw that being reflected in this book.

This book was dark and bloody and sometimes unnecessarily so. I felt ok about Meadow and ok about Zephr. Both of them didn't really make me feel for them like I sometimes feel for characters in books. I liked the alternating chapters style and didn't get mixed up while reading it. Lindsay provided different voices for Meadow and Zephr and I thought that was done really well.

I guess my main problems with this book were the world building and the writing style. First the world building. I didn't quite understand why the world turned out the way it did. How come the death rate is so appalling and killing just like this was ok. The government seemed really bad but how did it get this way? It gets somewhat explained towards the end but I wanted more! In this Dystopian world, there's not really this BIG BAD that I felt like controlled everything and gave us a reason to fear it. There were just crazy people running around that were supposed to be "the government" so it didn't quite make me understand how this world worked.

The writing style, while sometimes beautiful, I felt lacked description. I wanted a more rich book...as rich as a pool of fresh blood!!! The pacing was really really fast and sometimes I wished it slowed down a bit to provide richer description of the setting or feelings these characters were having. For instance, sometimes with certain action scenes, I'd get confused where the characters were and how the fights were happening. I didn't know who was in the scene and where the bad guys were in connection to the good guys in a room!

The ending was definitely a cliffhanger and I have no idea how Lindsay is going to turn this one around in the next book. It's almost a dire situation so I'll just leave it at that. I will be picking up the second and last book (I heard this was a duology) because I want to support her in every way! I just hope some of the problems I encountered in this one is somehow fixed in the next!